Don't Dream It's Over
by Mistress Leigh
Summary: What if there was a very good reason that Hermione hated Divination? Dreams aren't real, after all. But if they were - and that's a big "if" - it just might mean the end of everything...or the beginning of something wonderful.


There were never any tears after she woke from the dream. She always thought that was strange. Even when she was very small, and didn't have the words to explain the horror that she felt, she knew that she should be crying. There were people standing around her in the dream, and _they_ were crying, some of them wailing and screaming, but she never did, not even when she woke up. She couldn't, because it felt as if all of the blood had been drained from her body, and she was left with a cold numbness that made her feel as if she would never feel anything again. "It's over," was always her final thought before her eyes flew open and she sat up, gasping for air. She just didn't know what "it" was.

The dream was always exactly the same. The people around her were familiar but not familiar; her five-year-old self had no idea who they were, but yet she loved them. They were her family – which made no sense, because she knew that her family only consisted of her father and mother. These people wore strange clothes and shouted strange words and had these sticks that they waved around in the air and the sticks seemed to do things – scary things – that left Hermione fascinated but wary. And always, there was the giant.

This was the part that really baffled her, because there was no such thing as giants. She knew that, everyone knew that. But there he was in her dream, walking out of the forest, carrying...a boy? A man? It was hard to tell from that distance, especially when the man carrying him was so large, but whether he was a boy or a man he was the focus of Hermione's dream from the moment she set her eyes on him. That shock of black hair on his head, the worn clothing, the pale skin; she knew all of it, all of him. But she didn't, because her five-year-old self had never met anyone like that. So why did it terrify her so? Why did the sight of him take her breath away and make her feel as if nothing in her world would ever be right again?

He was dead, that she knew immediately. Even though she had never seen anyone who was dead, and didn't even completely understand what the word meant before the dreams started, she knew. And once she saw him in the dream, she knew that dead meant gone, and gone meant her life would never be the same again.

The hush that fell over the crowd when they caught sight of the boy being carried by the giant told her that they knew he was dead, too, and they were obviously stunned. But did they feel what she did? Because she didn't think they could. They kept breathing, and kept moving, even in their grief, and she couldn't do any of that. Why did that boy (man?) mean so much to her? The pain that she felt was so much, so all-consuming, that she was convinced that she always woke up when she did because if she didn't she would surely die herself. Maybe that's what would have happened., had the dream gone on. Maybe that was why she felt so empty. Was that what it felt like to die?

She asked her father, and that conversation hadn't gone very well. He, of course, wanted to know why she was thinking of such things, and when she told him that she had been having a dream almost every night about a giant and a dead man/boy with black hair and a crowd of people waving strange sticks in the air, he wanted to know what in the world she had been reading lately. When she told him that she was right in the middle of The Chronicles of Narnia he looked concerned and took her books away, saying that five was perhaps a bit young to be reading them.

Hermione thought that was completely ridiculous. Of course she was young, even she knew that most five-year-old's didn't read books like that just yet, but what did he expect her to do? Read the books that her classmates were reading? How boring! And yes, maybe the books had put some ideas into her head about mythical creatures and maybe that was where the giant came from, but she knew that something was different about this. This dream felt real. And it certainly didn't warrant having her books confiscated!

Not that it really mattered. As often happened with Hermione, the books reappeared in her bedroom a few hours later as if she had willed them there (and she thought, in her heart of hearts, that that's exactly what happened). Odd things like that had always happened around her, and she had come to expect them as time passed. That's why she knew that the dream meant something. It was part of the oddness, part of the special, almost magical aspect of her life that was growing more and more comfortable to her, even if it was causing her parents more and more dismay. Her father saw her the next day with one of the books in her lap, and while he obviously recognized it, he didn't say a word. He just shared a look over her head with her mother that was clearly more than a little bit uneasy.

As time passed the dream continued, and yet she never did understand it any better. It frightened her more and more, the older she grew, because the certainty that this was something that was going to happen– was fated to happen, somehow – grew with her. She found herself scouring crowds for boys with black hair, wondering if each dark-haired boy could possibly be _him_ , but it never felt right. None of the boys who went to her school were close enough to her for her to feel the devastation that she always felt in the dream; as a matter of fact, none of them were close to her at all. She didn't really have any friends. Maybe that was for the best. As much as she wanted to have friends, if it was only going to end in pain, perhaps she was better off alone.

By the time she was almost eleven, the dream was as much a part of her as her bushy hair and her love of books and her big expressive brown eyes. She had come to expect it, once or twice a week at least, and she had come to recognize more and more as she grew. The sticks, of course, were some kind of magic wand, although she couldn't for the life of her figure out why they were all carrying them. And they were all wearing some kind of robe - a witch's robe, she thought, but that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Witches weren't real! At least not the kind that carried magic wands. But she supposed that made about as much sense as the giant did, didn't it? None of it could truly be real. _But it is,_ her mind whispered to her more and more often now. She knew it. And she spent a good deal of time wondering if she were insane.

That is, until her eleventh birthday, when everything suddenly made sense. A woman calling herself a witch knocked on her door, and then stood in the middle of Hermione's house and told her and her parents that she, Hermione, was special, magical. That she was, in fact, a witch as well, and that wands and robes ( _and giants,_ her mind whispered) were all real. Professor McGonagall, as the woman introduced herself, brought both relief and terror to Hermione's heart that day. Her entire life suddenly made sense, and she knew why these strange things had always happened to her and around her. Magic was real, and she was going to be a part of it. She was going to belong, for once in her life. She was going to fit in. She believed it immediately and so, oddly enough, did her parents. Only two people who had dealt with the baffling happenings surrounding their daughter for as long as they had could accept it so easily. There had never been any good explanation for any of it, so learning that their daughter was a witch just seemed par for the course.

It was only after Professor McGonagall left that some of the happiness started to fade away. All afternoon there had been a niggling thought in the back of her mind that the woman looked familiar, but she hadn't yet been able to place her. She supposed that it was possible that she had seen her before – the woman might have a life outside of the world of magic, after all – but she knew that wasn't likely. It wasn't until she was getting ready for bed that night that the realization hit her so hard that she had to stop what she was doing and sit down lest her trembling legs give out completely; She knew professor McGonagall because she had seen her face in the dream! The woman had looked different there in Hermione's house - a little younger, maybe, and a little less world-weary, and a lot more pulled-together than she had looked from her place at the battle front of Hermione's dream - but it was definitely her. It was this, even more than the revelation of the magical world and Hermione's status as an actual witch, that chilled her to the bone before she closed her eyes for the night. Those people in her dream were real. There was no other explanation for it.

There was suddenly no running away; if those people were real, then the scene that had played out so many times during the night might actually happen one day. The misery of that knowledge filled her that evening, after her somewhat shell-shocked parents had tucked her in for the night, and when she almost immediately found herself in the middle of the sea of what she now knew for a fact were witches and wizards, she wasn't even surprised. It was just as it always was.

Except that it wasn't, not really. Something was different now. There was a new awareness, a new _knowing_ even in the midst of the dream, that this was her life from now on. These people _were_ her family, her friends, and whatever had brought them to this moment, it was her fight as well as theirs. She couldn't avoid this now, because these people needed her, this world needed her...and that boy, the one who's death caused the air to leave her lungs and her heart to break into a million pieces, he needed her, too. That's why she was having the dream, she was sure of it. And just as she caught sight of him in the dream, in that terrible moment, when she thought she would surely die right along with him, she knew his name. She knew it, and in her heart she promised him that she would find a way to save him.

"Harry," she said softly, just upon awakening. And then she did something that she never did after waking from the dream. She cried.

She didn't remember it the next morning.


End file.
